Christmas Eve Dinner

Things are a little slow around Christmas Eve. All the shops close early and everyone stays home for a family Christmas dinner. Our apartment is also really quite quiet as all our mates have headed home for the holidays.

With all the time on my hands, I decided that I would try my hand at making a "traditional" Norwegian Christmas dinner.

I heard from some Norwegians that pinnekjott is a rather popular dish around Christmas time. "Pinnekjott" I understand means twig meat. It is essentiall salted and dried lamb which looks a little like twigs before you cook it.

Apart from pinnekjott, there are also other traditional Norwegian meals as well. There is for instance "juletalerken", which is the standard Christmas meal of sausages, meatcakes, roast pork and potatoes. I tried it at IKEA about a week ago and it wasn't too exciting. It was probably something I could easily prepare back home if I wanted to.

There is also "lutefisk" which I believe is cod soaked in lye and dried. Lye, I understand, is an ingredient in modern day drain cleaners! Most non-Norwegians I've met really don't like it. I decided that although I really like trying out new and exciting foods, I wasn't bored enough (yet) to take on "lutefisk".

I therefore settled on pinnekjott, a dish which I couldn't make back home and which had a higher chance of tasting good than "lutefisk".

I bought a bag of pinnekjott from the RIMI at Ulleval Stadion on the day before Christmas eve. It was really crowded (by Oslo standards) and people were everywhere grabbing beer, milk, meat, oranges. Interestingly, Norwegians eat lots of oranges at Christmas time, kind of like Chinese New Year back home. A kilo of oranges were going for US$0.80! We have lost count of the number of oranges we have eaten.

There was a real bustle in the city.

Anyway, back to the pinnekjott. When I got home, I put half a kilo of pinnekjott to soak for about 10 hours. Here are pictures of the before, during and after.











The next day, I had to steam the hydrated lamb pieces to get it soft. This proved to be a little challenging because we don't have a steamer or any big pots. After a little experimenting, I settled on using two small pots (the biggest I could find in my apartment), two inverted bowls and two little plates. I split the lamb into two equal portions and steamed it in the two pots for about two hours or so.

While the lamb steamed, I prepared some turnip mash. I don't know if this is traditional Norwegian but all the pictures of pinnekjott I had seen had turnip mash and I decided that I would make it too. I just cut up the turnip, boiled it in some water. When it was done, I mixed some butter and a little milk into it and just mashed away. It was quite fun. I decided I wouldn't add any salt to the mash because the lamb would be salty enough.

When the lamb was done steaming, I popped the pieces into the oven at 200 for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile I reduced the juices from the steamer to pour onto the meat when serving. Here are more pictures.





















Candles are really popular here in Christmas time and very nice to have around during the dark winter months. But that is not the primary reason we decided to use the candles. The main reason was that the kithcen lights blew while I was cooking!

The sparkling drink in the picture is pear cider. We also had some akuavitt, a type of Scandinavian liquor we bought on our trip to Stockholm. I think it tastes like a mix between vodka and gin.

Bjorg prepared a traditional dessert called rissengrott. It was rice in cream with some vanilla flavour. It tasted vaguely like a Malay dessert. She just mixed a packet of the premix in hot water. Maybe we'll bring some packets home with us when we leave Norway.

So how did the pinnekjott taste? Well...it tasted like salted lamb. It was quite heavy tasting and oily but quite soft from all the steaming. It went well with the turnip mash which was a little sweet and light. The dessert worked out well too.

The best part about the meal was that it was so much cheaper than having it in a restaurant. The meal would have easly cost us well over US$100 if we had had it at a restaurant. I still have another half kilo of meat in the freezer!